From the Editor’s Desk

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and cometh from the Father of Life.

‘Live to learn and learn to live’ is an aphorism simple enough, but few of us realise its deep significance. It cannot be realised until we practise the truth of it in our own lives.

It is only a Perfect Master – perfect in the science and art of life – Who can bring home to us what is perfection and how can perfection be learnt and lived in life. Hence the need of a Perfect Master cannot be over-emphasised, at least for those of us who crave for perfection in the imperfect and shadowy life of the senses which we lead on the circumference of our being, far removed from the centre of life and existence.

Man is of necessity to be the teacher of man on all levels of his existence. We do need a teacher from the cradle to the grave, or the pyre, as the case may be. With all the training we get from infancy to dotage, we seldom get an opportunity to learn the science of True Living, much less how to practise it as an art. And until we delve at the roots of life, we cannot get to the well of water of which it is said:

I would give thee Living Water […] and whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall not athirst; but the water I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into Everlasting Life.

One cannot with all his learning and knowledge get, on his own, anywhere near the Truth, the Living Truth, knowing which everything else becomes known and nothing remains to be known, as the scriptures say. It is a science of soul or Para Vidya – the knowledge of the beyond and independent of the senses – and the experience of it comes only through a practical process of self-analysis whereby the spirit is unhooked from the body and mind with which it is now identified through constant association over the aeons.

When the spirit comes to its own and becomes a spirit free from the bodily and mental adjuncts, then alone it becomes capable of seeing the Light of the Void and of hearkening the Voice of the Void. It is an experience which the priests, pundits and pathis (reciters of the scriptures); maulvis, maulanas and mujahids (those engaged in austerities) can hardly grant with all their sacradotal knowledge. A really awakened person may, in His Grace, open the All-seeing Eye and unstop the All-hearing Ear and grant the gift of Life Everlasting so that one is not hurt of second death.

The esoteric knowledge is all abstract and abstruse. Hence the importance and need of a Living Master. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last on the Path Godwards. And He invites all, saying –

Let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the Water of Life freely.

This is living truly the life of the spirit and has got to be learnt and practised in life.